The seen and the unseen

I was at a real estate meeting last week, and at each meeting there's a guest speaker.  At this meeting the speaker was a hypno-therapist, and she talked a lot about how the human mind works.  It was all alluding to how your mind can affect the outcome of everything in your life, including your career, and she was trying to teach us how to put our minds in a positive position to help conquer the challenging and volatile field of real estate.  It got kind of involved, but in a nutshell, our mind is divided into two parts: the conscious, which makes up about 10% of our mind, and the subconscious, which occupies a whopping 90% of our mind. All our waking thoughts and actions, everything that we do voluntarily and perceive immediately in our world happens in our conscious mind.  However there is an overwhelming majority of our being that comes from a part of our mind that we are almost completely unaware of – the subconscious mind.  This vast, unseen sea is the true source of who we are.  Our entire lifetime of experiences and emotions are collected in the subconscious, and every decision we make on a conscious level must first filter through and surface from that deep and endless ocean. It is completely hidden from our waking lives, yet we are totally bound to its will.

When I think about spirituality, I think an analogy can be made.  The physical, tangible world that we live in – the hair growing on top of your head, the burrito you ate for lunch, the money in your bank account, the atmosphere that surrounds our planet – all exist in a physical, logical world.  You can measure, quantify and logically prove everything.  But I feel like there is another part of us that exists beyond anything tangible; a part of us that goes so much deeper than the physical world is able to reach.

Your skin and your muscles tell your brain that you're being hugged, but your soul is that part that feels the warmth of an embrace and cherishes it in a way that cannot be measured.

Two people can stand in front of each other, push air through their vocal chords, causing them to vibrate at different frequencies, and move their lips and tongue in a way to make lots of sounds that the brain perceives as language. But only your soul will experience the fellowship and joy of a deep conversation with a good friend.

Many long strings of metal can be stretched over a hollow piece of wood, and they can be caused to vibrate at a certain rate that will generate a succession of different sound waves that vibrate our eardrums and are perceived as sound. But a guitar in the right hands can create music that only our soul can hear, and it can be enough to bring someone to their knees, make a whole room of people jump up and dance, or cause someone to cry for the memory of a lost loved one.

Inside these vessels of bone, muscle, fluids, skin, and general pile of meat that make up our physical body, there is a living soul that is the true essence of our being.  Both parts are very much alive.  But one of those will die forever.  Our heart will stop beating one day. We will stop breathing. Our flesh will become cold, and our body will die.  But the part that is our mind, our spirit, our soul, I think that part goes on to another life.

I think there are many people who live their entire lives within the 10% of their minds that is their conscious mind, the 10% of the world that is tangible.  They think that's all there is to it – whatever I can see and prove, that's the end of the universe, there is no meaning for anything beyond that.  But I think they're ignoring the 90% that is unseen with their physical eyes, yet is secretly driving every decision they make.  The 90% that holds true love, compassion, beauty, and faith.  It's the food you eat that "will never spoil", it's the water you drink that will "become a spring of water welling up to eternal life."  I think in this part of the universe is where God would live – a place that we can't see with our eyes, but we can feel with our soul. We exist in both places at once, and it is up to us to acknowledge and cherish both of them in their own right.